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More than two years have passed since Austria, Finland, and Sweden joined the European Union. What are we to make of the Class of '95 and in particular Finland's contribution to the club?
First, the good news. The influx of fresh blood has benefited everyone. On open government, women's equality, free trade and sound financial management, the newcomers are tilting the balance away from the closed, male-dominated, spendthrift world which has long held sway in Brussels.
Yet EU membership has also been a culture shock for the new members, forcing them to think beyond narrow national concerns toward a more nebulous and unfamiliar concept called the common European interest. For the most part, Finland has coped better than either Austria and Sweden. Why?
Finland is reaping the benefits of the decision to join the EU for political rather than economic reasons. Having stepped out of the shadow of Soviet Russia, the Finns appear to be well on the way toward building a new selfconfidence, perhaps even a new national identity, as EU members. "They are the Irish of the North," says a senior Danish diplomat.
Mr Erkki Liikanen, Finland's Commissioner and a former ambassador to the EU, says Finnish policy can be summed up as wanting to be part of the family. "Finland does not want to make life more difficult for its partners," he explains. "We want to be in the mainstream."
Finland's new European policy amounts to more than opting for a quiet life: it means committing wholeheartedly to core EU policies. In practice, this means the project to launch economic and monetary union in 1999 which has become the defining force in European integration.
Late last year, Mr Paavo Lipponen, prime minister, underlined his government's commitment to Emu by arranging for the Finnish markka to enter the European exchange rate mechanism, one week ahead of potentially tricky elections for the European Parliament. Helsinki's ERM gambit left Sweden trailing in its wake, and the subsequent containment of Finland's anti-EU vote compared even more favourably with an earlier rightwing surge in Euro-parliamentary elections in Austria.
Finland's ERM move means that it is now well on course to meet the EMU entry criteria. First, it will have been inside the exchange rate mechanism...